The present invention relates generally to tracking orders in production, and more particularly to techniques for applying customer-specific labels to an unprinted side of printed products.
Vendors of fine printed products traditionally manufactured printed products on offset printers by printing long runs of the same print job. Each print job required an expensive and time-consuming setup process, involving the separation of colors of the document into primary ink colors (such as Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black), creation of aluminum printing plates for each ink color, and mounting and setup of the aluminum printing plates in the printing press. Traditionally, each print job corresponded to a document ordered by a single customer. Orders were tracked by print job and were simple to track because only a single print job was printed at a time, and each print job required physical setup of the printing press.
With the increasing preference of customers to shop online, at least one web-based customized printed product vendor (namely, www.vistaprint.com) now allows a customer to order small or large quantities of customer-personalized printed products. Vistaprint.com may aggregate the orders of personalized printed products from multiple customers into a single print job to achieve enhanced performance advantage by reducing or eliminating the setup time required between individual customers' print jobs. When large numbers of a customer's product is ordered, for example 250 business cards, the customer's business card design may be aggregated with hundreds of other customers' business designs into a composite print job, whereby each of the individual customers' designs are arranged and printed onto a single sheet of substrate. The print job is run to print 250 sheets. The stack of 250 printed sheets may then be cut into individual stacks of 250 business cards, each stack containing 250 identical business cards corresponding to the same customer, and each individual stack potentially corresponding to a different customer.
For orders of large quantities of small products (such as business cards or other printed products in which multiple designs may be simultaneously printed on a single substrate), customer orders may be tracked by keeping track of the position of the customer's design in the composite print design.
For orders of small quantities of larger products, such as orders of banners and posters in single-digit quantities (such as 1 or 2), order tracking becomes more difficult. One way of tracking a particular customer's order is to print an identifier such as a barcode together with the design. Because customers of fine printed products do not desire to have a barcode integrated into the design to be printed, the barcode (or other identifier) may be printed outside the printed design area. However, customers do not desire to receive a printed product that requires trimming.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a technique for printing and associating a barcode or other identifier unique to a customer or customer order, and allowing the barcode to stay with the product without requiring the customer to trim the product upon receipt of the product.